Police are people who consider themselves entitled to use aggressive violence against others, and punish those who defend themselves. When a Mundane dares to resist police aggression — even to the extent of passive non-cooperation — police will not only escalate violence until resistance is subdued, but will continue until punitive damage is inflicted on the victim. This leads to a phenomenon I call a “thugscrum,” in which a pack of feral cops throw themselves on top of a victim and maul him (or her) while one or more of their comrades will face outward to deter intervention on the victim’s behalf.

The second was the fact that the individual who interposed against the cop’s aggression then intervened to prevent serious injury when someone else decided to pile on once the primary aggressor had been put down. We will never see a “good cop” intervene in similar fashion to prevent a punitive beating of a resisting Mundane. This is why thugscrums coalesce around prone, defenseless victims — and why genuinely decent people like former Officer Regina Tasca, who earnestly want to be peace officers, are purged from the ranks for trying to protect victims of police violence.

The prelude to this altercation wasn’t captured on video, but I don’t consider that matter to be terribly important. The officer wasn’t intervening to prevent a crime, and he deployed a reliably deadly weapon to carry out a punitive strike against an unarmed citizen. The man who intervened showed much greater restraint in responding to a genuine crime of violence.